This photochrome print of the port in Ostend is part of “Views of Architecture and Other Sites in Belgium” from the catalog of the Detroit Publishing Company (1905). Ostend was a very popular destination and busy sea port ( still is as far as I know. Even back around 1890-1900, when this photo was taken, Ostend was connected by rail to Brussels and to the English port of Dover via ferry. The photo might look a little off for a color photograph. While the colors are amazing in their own unique way the photo was originally a black and white which the Detroit Publishing Company colorized using the Swiss “Photochrom” process.

Over in the great state of Illinois 84 percent of third-graders clear state-mandated reading hurdle. At bare minimum that means they know when an adjective or adverb modifies a noun or verb. Could Mitt Romney pass the same test? Mitt Romney, Very Bad Book Reviewer – “As you might notice from the phrase “even if,” Summers denied that health-care reform affected the pace of the recession. That is, he was claiming the opposite of the position imputed to him by Romney.”

Most of the daily maintenance of the human body’s billions of cellular actions are automatic. Like other mammals we have obtained the biological singularity – the programming in our genes and the proteins they make doing the daily maintenance, leaving us to work, or daydream – some of even manage to multitask – or so we imagine. That is not to say that thin, fat or in between you can forgo making a conscious contribution to your well being. Someday the butter and the lack of exercise will catch up – Flesh and Bones by Tara Ison – “Clavicles, actually. There are two of them, the darlings, the slender twin horizontal bones forming those small knobs at the naked shoulders’ tops…..”

Delusion: Technology companies won’t admit that much of their ‘innovation’ is due to public assistance

According to the report Funding a Revolution, government provided almost half of basic research funds into the 1980s. Federal funding still accounted for half of research in the communications industry as late as 1990. Even today, the federal government supports about 60 percent of the research performed at universities.

Apple’s first computer was introduced in the late 1970s. Apple still does most of its product and research development in the United States, with US-educated engineers and computer scientists.

Google’s business is based on the Internet, which started as ARPANET, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency computer network from the 1960s. The National Science Foundation funded the Digital Library Initiative research at Stanford University that was adopted as the Google model.

Apple got its tax bill down to 9.8% last year. About 2/3 of its profits remain overseas for tax avoidance purposes. Google, like Apple, avoids taxes by moving most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda. Both Apple and Google, along with Microsoft and Cisco, are lobbying for a repatriation tax holiday to allow billions of overseas dollars to come home at a greatly reduced tax rate.

An Apple executive said: “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.” That may be true, but they do have an obligation to pay the taxes that help America solve its problems.

That little box with the moving pictures and talking heads is great technology that is not living up to its potential, Economies

To Our Galtian Overlords, the real economy is the Great Casino, the rest of it is just inputs into the probability matrix machine. What matters are “markets,” not whether people have jobs or anything to eat. And the rest of the media largely follows this. When the stock market goes up, you can sense the “economy is fine!!!” narrative taking shape. When the stock market drops, worried coverage reappears.